Team
Omar Gadir, Ph.D. - Founder / CEO
Omar’s experience as a manager, an architect and a developer spans both startups and established companies. He directly managed 7 complex shipped products. At Photon Dynamics he managed a high precision AI product for semiconductor defect detection that led to an IPO. At Auspex, he shipped a patented storage virtualization product and high availability scalable enterprise servers. At Kazeon, he led the platform team for its security and regulatory compliance product (Kazeon was acquired by EMC).
Omar graduated with a Ph. D. in Artificial Intelligence, from Loughborough University, UK. Loughborough University is a top ranked university. He was also awarded an M. Sc. in Digital Signal processing from the University of Wales, UK. He is the sole author of four patents on data management and distributed processing and the main author of a patent on High Availability Cluster Server System. Omar lost three close relatives to cancer. This motivated him to pivot the startup, Iteru Systems, to build an AI platform to expedite cancer drug discovery and therapeutics.
Jim Perry – Co-Founder, Head of Data
Jim has 20+ years’ experience in both startups and established companies as a software architect and developer of new products. He was the architect of products that resulted in two successful startups acquisitions (Kazeon and ArcSight). He is a graduate of Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH, where he developed an appreciation for how to build scalable and efficient software. Jim built the core language system of Iteru’s proof of concept platform. The platform includes: ingestion of different biomedical data sets and its integration in a data lake. His deep knowledge of distributed systems enabled him to build a platform scalable to 1 petabyte. To comply with Iteru’s objective of very high accuracy for drug discovery, Jim built a very accurate data mining and text extraction methodologies and implemented automated classification algorithms for use in labeling biomedical data. His expert knowledge of data security and compliance, including HIPPA, and cloud computing is vital to the next step of transforming the proof of concept product into a full-fledged platform scalable to 1 petabyte of data.
Pete Vukovich
Pete has extensive experience in architecting and implementing large content driven applications, building data management systems, developing algorithms, website applications, indexing and search. He is a graduate of UC Berkeley, where he earned BA in Mathematics. At Verity he designed and implemented topic editing, search and security modules for its data platform. While at Adobe, he implemented new features for Adobe Acrobat, including configurable interpreter to support various I/O devices. At Auspex he re-architected and implemented server management and sales configuration UI. While at Nextaq he implemented scalable framework that increased data throughput capability to around 20 million visits per hour.
His fluency in many programming languages, knowledge of the backend and frontend architectures, his experience in parsers, database schemas and UI architecture were crucial for building Iteru’s prototype platform. Petes ability to rapidly prototype subsystems and products is very crucial for evaluating complex AI implementations and ensure their accuracy. His interest in genomics studies and diseases coupled to his in-depth knowledge of algorithms are essential for the advancement of Iteru products.
Scientific Advisors
Richard Boismenu, Ph. D.
Dr. Boismenu is a distinguished immunologist and drug development executive at the forefront of cutting-edge medical advancements. He played a pivotal role in shaping the future of immune- and CNS- directed therapies, and genetic medicines.
Dr. Boismenu embarked on his academic journey, earning his doctoral degree in Immunology from McGill University. His insatiable curiosity and dedication to scientific inquiry led him to a tenure-track faculty position at the renowned Scripps Research Institute. He currently serves on the membership committee of the American Association of Immunologists, a preeminent force in the field of immunology. Throughout his career in biopharma Dr. Boismenu has been instrumental developing innovative therapies addressing unmet medical needs. He has held positions of increasing scope and responsibilities at Repligen, Genentech, Coherus, IgGenix and Sangamo Therapeutics. Driven by a deep sense of purpose, Dr. Boismenu is dedicated to accelerating the clinical translation of scientific discoveries using innovative tools such as AI to make available treatments that meaningfully improve patient outcomes and enhance quality of life.
Gilles J. A. Gallant, BPharm Ph.D.
Dr. Gilles Gallant is an oncology expert with broad biotechnology and pharmaceutical experience in strategic cancer drug development, evaluation, and innovations. Currently he is the Chief Development Officer at Mythic Therapeutics. At Daiichi Sankyo, he was Senior Vice President Global Head of Oncology Clinical Development and led the development of the company’s global oncology portfolio. There, he built and led the team that guided the clinical development, the global regulatory submission and worldwide approval of the antibody-drug conjugate Enhertu® for the treatment of patients with advanced breast cancer, gastric cancer and lung cancer (NSCLC).
At Bristol-Myers-Squibb he designed and led clinical trials of the oncology pipeline resulting in the worldwide approval of three indications (lung, breast, and ovarian cancer) for the blockbuster Taxol®. At Human Genome Sciences and later at BioMarin Pharmaceutical he was responsible for the development strategy and clinical implementation for all oncology and hematology assets leading to the approval of Talzenna(TM).
Dr. Gallant received his doctorate in medicinal chemistry and bachelor’s degree in pharmacy from the Université de Montréal in Québec, Canada and is a Fellow of the Order of Pharmacists of Québec (FOPQ).
Tillman Pearce, M. D
Tillman has a distinguished record of accomplishments as a leader in clinical development across a range of large pharmaceutical and start-up biotechnology companies. He was the Medical Director Oncology Business Unit at Sanofi-Synthelabo and Assistant Director, Oncology Clinical Research at Novartis. He also held the position of Chief Medical Officer at different companies including, Sandoz, Protein Design Labs, KaloBios, Threshold Pharmaceuticals, and others. He has deep experience with both pre- and post-marketing clinical development in the areas of solid tumors, hematologic malignancies, immuno-oncology, inflammation, and infectious diseases.
Tillman is hired for a range of roles from Chief Medical Officer; Scientific, Medical or Corporate Board Member; opportunity and due diligence advisor. Recently he has mostly been focused on providing deep science and clinical insights to give founders and investors more clarity of risks and potential opportunities. Currently he is the Chief Medical Officer at ALAFIA and is a Biotechnology Strategy Advisor at TCellCo.